Early this morning I received an email from Sedo customer support, promoting .Asia domain names.

Sedo listed www.cj7.asia and www.cj7cares.asia as “successful” examples, with cj7cares.asia receiving more than 500,000 users “within a few days of the campaign”. I’d never heard of CJ7 before… so when I typed it into google I got IMDB and Wikipedia links at position #1 and #2 followed by Sony Pictures at #3. It turns out that CJ7 is a SCIFI/Fantasy movie for kids.

The interesting thing is…. I couldn’t find any .asia listed in Google related to CJ7. However cj7.asia was listed on many press releases promoting the .Asia TLD. I wonder how much traffic is related to the press release vs the domain being indexed by the search engines?

Sedo writes:

“Now is the time to invest into the future. Make history and reap returns on the most prestigious virtual real estate in Asia.”

It’s obviously in Sedos interest to promote new TLD’s like .asia. That way the buyers can list the names on Sedo for auction. Provided they sell – everyone wins.

Depending on your viewpoint, I was either “entitled”, one of the lucky ones or wasted $130 on a .asia. Yes about a month ago I was allocated prosperity.asia. No, I didn’t have to go to auction because I already had the company name and registered the .asia as a part of the Sunrise 3 round.

Like most Australian domainers, I have been bombarded with email from US registrars telling me how this thing is “the next Internet landrush”.  So, what do the numbers actually say? Well, last night the .Asia / Pool.com team emailed me with some interesting figures.

• From February 20, 2008 to March 12, 2008 (the .ASIA Landrush Period) they received 473,633 domain name applications.

• 45,697 domains received more than one application during the Landrush Period.

For those that didn’t participate, the remaining domains will be made available on a first-come, first-served basis on March 26, 2008.